Growing mushrooms on coffee waste

Transcription

1 5 Benefits of: Growing mushrooms on coffee waste Why Growing Oyster Mushrooms On Coffee Waste Makes So Much Sense

2 When we first started growing Oyster mushrooms on coffee waste back in 2011 we could see instantly why it made so much sense. During the years since our first harvests we ve found even more reasons to grow on coffee grounds, and we re really excited about helping to get other people growing too. On the following pages we ll give you our 5 top reasons why growing Oyster mushrooms on coffee grounds makes so much sense.

3 Reason # 1 No Need To Sterilise Growing Substrate Normally when growing mushrooms you need to first pasteurise the straw or sterilise the sawdust. The most common way to pasteurise your substrate is using hot water or steam, which is either messy on a small scale, or costly on a larger scale. The beauty of growing mushrooms on coffee waste is that the grounds are pasteurised by the brewing process; meaning you can completely cut out this time-consuming, energy intensive and costly step.

4 Reason # 2 Simple To Get Started Not needing to sterilise your substrate also means that it can be really simple to get started and you don't need loads of big, expensive equipment. Once you know what you're doing you can just go out to your local cafe, collect some grounds, mix in some mushroom spawn, bag it up and watch it grow. It's not massively different to planting tomato or basil seeds you just need to learn what conditions to create for your mushrooms to grow.

5 Reason # 3 It s Ideal Substrate Apart from being already pasteurised, coffee grounds also contain the key nutrients that Oyster mushrooms need to grow. They provide ample amounts of Carbon, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium and more. Coffee grounds are also hydrated with water through the brewing process - depending on how the coffee was made, you sometimes need to adjust the water content, but we cover this in more detail inside our online course.

6 Reason # 4 Coffee Waste Is Easy To Source In Cities Chances are if you live in a large town or city you'll have a pretty good idea how big coffee consumption is these days. Globally we consume 8.4 million tonnes of coffee beans a year and this is set to rise in the next 5 years by another 25%. This booming industry is all about getting you the cup of coffee you want. Almost no thought is given to the waste coffee grounds. They are very often just thrown in the bin, and you'll find most cafes very happy to give you their grounds.

7 Reason # 5 Great Nutritional & Health Benefits Oyster mushrooms are one the easiest of all mushrooms to cultivate, but they are also extremely rich in nutrition. Not only are they low in calories, cholesterol-free, and very low in sodium. They are also high in protein and fibre, and contain significant levels of minerals and B vitamins. Recent studies have shown that Oyster mushrooms also have cholesterol lowering, anti-oxidant and even anti-cancer properties. Check out this article by the master of mycology, Paul Stamets, about the many great properties of Oyster mushrooms.

8 So there we are - lots of reasons to grow Oyster mushrooms on coffee waste! This is exactly why we're so inspired by the whole idea and why we want to help spread the technique by getting people like you involved. People from 40 countries around the world have already taken our online course and are putting what they learnt into action. We ll send you more info about the course soon, so keep an eye out for some s for us in the next few days. Best wishes, Adam & Eric